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Class. 
Book. 



F35I 









THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY ORGANIZED 



BY 



JAMES K. HOSMER 



Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1901 






'ji 



THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY ORGANIZED. 



The territory of Oklahoma, with the 
Indian Territory the last fragment of the 
Mississippi Valley not yet constitution- 
ally organized, has at the present time 
every requisite for statehood, and will, 
so says report, apply at the next session 
of Congress for admission to the Union. 
The moment when the great basin be- 
comes occupied throughout by proper 
commonwealths, these taking the place 
of the wilderness which a hundred and 
fifty years ago was quite unbroken, is a 
fitting one in which to review its story. 

The Mississippi Valley has long been 
famed as the most remarkable river 



basin of the world. "While that of the 
Amazon may surpass it in area, the 
South American basin is far less avail- 
able for human uses. The northern val- 
ley has a climate well suited in every 
part for the better breeds of men. Mil- 
lions of its acres are surpassingly fer- 
tile ; where tillage fails, the herdsman 
and shepherd find opportunity ; or, if 
both farmer and ranchman miss their 
chance, the miner wins from desert or 
mountain coal, oil, and almost every use- 
ful metal. Scarcely a square mile but 
yields gifts that are precious. It is the 
very lap of Plenty. 



The Mississippi Valley Organized. 



615 



Into this favored region are gathered 
some thirty-five million English-speaking 
men, the largest compact body, except 
possibly the population of Gi'eat Britain, 
to be found in the world. Hei-e are half 
the states of the American Union, send- 
ing their waters to the Gulf through the 
great river. Near its heart is the cen- 
tre of population of the Union ; the cen- 
tre of influence, too, is here, as each 
decade shows more plainly. In our his- 
tory there are no more heroic figures 
than have arisen here ; nor is the gen- 
eral average of intelligence, energy, and 
manly virtue anywhere higher. In no 
other region of the earth, probably, are 
the conditions so favorable for the best 
human development. 

In the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, in the valley, the wilderness was 
scarcely broken. Coronado's superb 
march from the Gulf of California to the 
Missouri River (even so far, it has been 
thought, he may have penetrated) had 
left no trace except in the pages of the 
chroniclers ; nor was there trace of Her- 
nando de Soto. The French, in their 
turn, had done little more than the Span- 
iards. Marquette, Hennepin, La Salle, 
and their fellow pathbreakers had thread- 
ed the streams and pierced the woods 
with the sturdiest heroism, but to lit- 
tle purpose as far as the redemption of 
the area to civilization was concerned. 
The forests were unfelled, the prairies 
unploughed ; the Indians still possessed 
the land. In the half dozen clusters of 
cabins scattered from New Orleans to 
the Great Lakes, the likelihood was far 
greater that the habitan would sink into 
the savage than that the savage would 
rise into something higher. But the sub- 
duers were at hand. 

In 1748, an explorer penetrating the 
virgin land had named a river and a 
mountain gap after the proud-prancing 
Cumberland, a great hero of those days ; 
oddly perpetuating thus a memory of 
the Jacobite crisis in the nomenclature 
of a land that was to care nothing for 



either James or George. But the first 
symptom of an interest in the thirteen 
colonies in the world beyond the moun- 
tains was the dispatching, in 1753, of 
the youth George Washington into the 
woods ; his mission being to inquire of 
the French commandant at the head 
springs of the Alleghany, where the 
French came in by a short portage from 
the Great Lakes, what were the inten- 
tions of France, and to explain what 
were the claims of Virginia. Presently 
came Braddock's attempt, and in 1759 
the event on the Plains of Abraham. 
The colonial world was now well alive. 
and straightway began a movement for 
the winning of the West. 

Early in the eighteenth century, the 
Scotch-Irish, a race doubled and twist- 
ed in the making, flung by persecution 
and hardship from island to island, knit 
and toughened in the stress of exile and 
war, came in large numbers to Amer- 
ica. They were received especially at 
ports of the middle and Southern colo- 
nies, and their taste and enteri^rise soon 
led them away from the seaboard into 
the backwoods. At a synod held at an 
early day in Philadelphia, John Cald- 
well, grandfather of John Caldwell Cal- 
houn, proposed to the governor that if 
freedom of conscience were allowed, the 
Scotch-Irish would fend off the Indian 
danger at the back of the province. The 
bargain was made, and well did the 
Scotch-Irish perform their part. Follow- 
ing the valley between the AUeghanies 
and the Blue Ridge in a movement at the 
time little marked, assimilating new ele- 
ments. Huguenot, German, and English, 
they reached, in a generation or so, the 
highlands of western North Carolina, 
and here were recruited by bands of their 
kindred coming west fx'om their landing 
place at Charleston. A race better fit- 
ted than this one to play the part of fron- 
tiersmen has never appeared. As an axe 
has welded upon its front a mass of steel 
before the softer iron, a mass capable of 
taking on a keen cutting edge, not to be 



GIG 



The Mississippi Valley Organized. 



dinted or broken by anything it may have 
to cleave or hew, so, j^rovidentially it 
would seem, the Anglo-Saxon advance 
was provided with a Scotch-Irish cutting 
edge of extraordinary temper. Present- 
ly the pioneers were on the Mississijjpi 
watershed ; and hardly had they entered, 
when, at a clump of cabins on a moun- 
tain stream, the " Watauga Association " 
was established, a system of government 
for a little state formed after the best 
Anglo-Saxon precedents. Thus signifi- 
cantly on the very threshold began the 
organizing, James Robertson, a Scotch- 
Irishman, and the Huguenot John Se- 
vier standing out as leading spirits ; and 
shortly after, Daniel Boone and his men, 
just established in Kentucky, followed 
the example. Now occurred an incident 
which showed plainly how the pioneers 
meant to stand. In the late spi'ing of 
1775, a newcomer to a camp having 
read from a scrap of newspaper the an- 
nouncement of the event of the 19th of 
April, the backwoodsmen forthwith bap- 
tized the stockade, and the town that 
sprang from it, Lexington. 

The backwoodsmen were effective 
strivers in the struggle for independence, 
though they had a foe to face in the 
Indians, nearer at hand and more ter- 
rible than the soldiers of George III. 
At King's Mountain, in 1780, when 
things were darkest, the men who had 
crossed the watershed, turning back un- 
der Sevier and Shelby, decided the day 
for the Americans ; and still earlier, in 
1778, George Rogers Clark, in one of 
the most extraordinary of campaigns, 
won for Virginia, and ultimately for the 
United States, the great Northwest. In 
the drama of the Revolution, there is, 
perhaps, no episode so picturesque as 
this enterprise of Clark. As if fortune 
loved so brave a soul, he happened to 
strike in at the most opportune moment. 
As he laid his plan before Patrick Henry, 
governor of Virginia, the news came of 
Burgoyne's surrender, and soon after of 
the French alliance. His first task with 



his little army of two hundred was to win 
the Creoles of the Wabash and the Illi- 
nois, — a task now not difficult, since the 
Americans had defeated the conquerors 
of Montcalm, and been taken into friend- 
ship by the French king. To gain the 
Indians was a far different achievement, 
as they gathered from the remotest 
points, and with imjilacable faces con- 
fronted the young leader at the Cahokia 
council fire. They were won, however, by 
a union of bravado with the deftest tact ; 
after wliich came a problem where diffi- 
culty culminated, the coping with Ham- 
ilton, the capable British commander at 
Detroit. How Clark stole upon Vin- 
cennes, in February, through the drowned 
lands of the Wabash, his men plunging 
to the waist, to the breast, at last to the 
chin, through the icy flood ; how he fought 
their discouragement, now by sternness, 
now by contriving to turn hardship into 
a joke ; how the fortress was captured at 
last, almost without bloodshed, the whole 
campaign, indeed, jjresenting a spectacle 
of fine strategy and iron persistency, with 
almost nothing sanguinary, — all this is 
remarkable in the history of warfare. 
The means of Clark were insignificant ; 
the results he achieved in the highest 
degree momentous, — achievements per- 
formed with swiftness and ease springing 
from a high degree of genius. Our mili- 
tary history has no page more brilliant. 
Tracing, as we are trying to do, the 
organization of a wilderness into a well- 
ordered state, the year 1787, in which 
fell the adoption of the Federal Consti- 
tution and the Northwest Ordinance, is 
beyond all others epoch-making. In the 
framing of these most mighty instru- 
ments the men of the Mississipjii Valley 
had no part ; yet no other region has 
derived so much from their far-reach- 
ing, beneficent action. Kentucky in 1792 
and Tennessee in 1796 came forward 
into statehood, heading the recruitment 
which has brought the confederation of 
thirteen up to (if we count Oklahoma) 
forty-six. The states of the Mississippi 



The Mississippi Valley Organized. 



617 



Valley, more than a score in number, 
have come into being as a consequence 
of these instruments ; most of them with 
slavery prohibited, with the sixteenth 
section of each township set apart for 
the support of public schools, with every 
point of Anglo-Saxon freedom effectu- 
ally guaranteed. No sooner had their 
ordinances gone fairly into effect than the 
area over which their influence was to 
be felt was immensely increased. 

In the nineteenth century, perhaps in 
all the centuries, there has been no hero 
quite so picturesque and magnetic as 
Napoleon. Refuse though we may to 
regard him as good, or, in the highest 
sense, great, yet there is no such other 
name to conjure by, and the spell he ex- 
ercises over men seems to increase rather 
than diminish. Probably in no previous 
portrayal has that towering personali- 
ty appeared to a greater extent unique 
and ultrahuman than in the presentment 
lately made "by Lord Rosebery in his 
Napoleon, the Last Phase. With the 
opening of the nineteenth century the 
Mississippi Valley felt a memorable ef- 
fect from the commotion at that time 
changing the face of Europe. The 
French Revolution having taken its 
course, the fateful Corsican was in full 
career, having reached, through the cam- 
paigns of 1796, of Egypt, and of Ma- 
rengo, the position of First Consul. 
While there can be no doubt as to the 
extent to which Napoleon affected Eu- 
rope, have we fairly made it real to 
ourselves that scarcely any other man 
has affected so momentously America ? 
Washington was the father of the coun- 
try ; Lincoln preserved it ; Napoleon dou- 
bled its area. The conjunction seems 
grotesque, but it can be justified. 

The addition to our Union of the vast 
territory lying between the great river 
and the Rocky Mountains was a result 
of French statesmanship, and ought to 
be so described. Jefferson and his nego- 
tiators, Livingston and Monroe, played 
but a secondary part in the transaction. 



That this great area is ours to-day is 
simply and solely because the exigency 
of Napoleon at the moment made it ex- 
pedient for him that it should be ours. 
It was not asked for by us ; nor, in giv- 
ing it to us, was there in his mind any 
thought of our interests. Louisiana was 
simply tossed over to us because the 
stress of the occasion made this disposal 
of it convenient. At first the arbiter 
had had a different tliought. Remem- 
bering the loss of New France, in the 
days of Wolfe, as a terrible disgrace, 
Napoleon had dreamed of recovering it, 
as his hand grew powerful. But things 
went badly in San Domingo, and at 
home a terrible pressure was close at 
hand. It was becoming plain that the 
whole of Europe must be confronted. 
Napoleon, no less prudent than bold, saw 
in time the folly of engaging his hands 
in an American complication, when foes 
were so near. He wanted money, too, 
for his combat. Just at the moment, the 
Americans, desiring free navigation of 
tlie Mississippi, made an offer to buy the 
moutli of the river, and the town of New 
Orleans which guarded it. Tliey asked 
for nothing more ; they dreamed of no- 
thing more. " That you shall have," 
said Napoleon, of a sudden changing his 
policy, and driving at once, as was his 
wont, impetuously to his end ; " and be- 
sides, you shall have the vast wilderness 
lying north and west. I wish to keep it 
out of the hands of England, whom only 
in this way I can baffle, and tlie fifteen 
million dollars which you shall give me 
for it I will use in preparations against 
her." So Louisiana fell to us ; for who, 
in those years, could stand against Na- 
poleon ! In the transaction, the First 
Consul gave, for the first time, free 
course to his autocratic will ; for he 
rode cavalierly, as his brother Lucien 
has graphically narrated, over the oppo- 
sition of his family and the muttered 
disapjjroval of the Chambers and the na- 
tion. Shortly afterward he had grasped 
crown and sceptre, having increased two- 



618 



The Mississippi Valley Organized. 



fold, by his first imperial nod, the area 
of the United States. In the whole his- 
tory of the Mississippi Valley, there is 
nothing more startHng than the way in 
which this Olympian figure touched mo- 
mentarily, but so momentously, the course 
of its development. 

The great new West beyond the river, 
thus acquired, and immediately after ex- 
plored by tlie stout pathbreakers Lewis 
and Clark, fell early into danger of be- 
ing cut off from the nation to which it 
had come. Wliat, precisely, Aaron Burr 
had planned has not been definitely 
ascertained ; but Spain was to be robbed 
and the United States to be dismem- 
bered that Aaron Burr might sit exalted. 
That he was foiled was due, possibly, 
in the main, to the action of a person 
the most characteristic type of the fron- 
tiersman, perhaps, that the border has 
ever furnished; though the importance 
of the man, and of the stand he then 
took, did not appear until later. When 
Burr, pursuing his scheme, had reached 
Tennessee, he encountered there a spare, 
fiery, impetuous figure, of Scotch-Irish 
blood, major general of the Tennessee mi- 
litia, — Andrew Jackson. To win Jack- 
son would have been for Burr a great, 
it may be a decisive thing ; for already 
Jackson showed a most masterful spirit. 
He felt strongly the fascination of the 
conspirator ; but when, in Burr's talk, 
there fell out a hint at disunion, the glam- 
our vanished ; the frontiersman could 
not be moved, blocking thus early in his 
career the course of separatism. Sup- 
pose that, in those uncertain days, Jack- 
son had taken the other turn. What he 
could do at the head of a body of fron- 
tier riflemen he was before long to show. 

But Jackson was to go far higher. 
Napoleon fell at last from his high es- 
tate, and languished in Elba. Was the 
Mississippi Valley really to escape the 
clutch of England ? England put on ship- 
board nearly twenty thousand fighting 
men, soldiers and sailors, and, in the lull 
of European conflict, sent the expedition 



to the mouths of the Mississippi. The 
captains of Nelson marshaled the ships ; 
the veterans of Wellington stood ready 
for the shore work. Civil officials were 
provided ; for, when the easy victory 
had been gained, the land possessed and 
newly organized was to become a Cana- 
da of the South, balancing the Canada 
of the North. It was a motley crowd 
that confronted the great army before 
New Orleans, January 8, 1815 : pirates 
from Barataria, French and Spaniards 
from the ancient Creole city, now and 
then among them an old soldier from the 
Napoleonic wars, negroes and Indians, 
waifs and strays from everywhere ; but 
among them stood a body of Tennes- 
see and Kentucky riflemen. That day, 
Andrew Jackson, as leader, showed a 
power of command quite extraordinary. 
Through personal force he welded these 
fragments, so ill assorted, into an effec- 
tive army ; so that after the English line 
had charged, three generals, — the com- 
mander among them, — seven colonels, 
and the rank and file by thousands lay 
prostrate, and there was nothing for it 
but retreat. Andrew Jackson became 
the leading man in the country, an ex- 
traordinary force both for evil and for 
good in the shaping of American desti- 
nies. Raised to the highest jilace, he 
was the main promoter of the spoils, 
system ; in finance he was a bull in a 
china shop ; in dealing with foreign na- 
tions a bully, always with a chip on his 
shoulder. But, on the other hand, in 
spite of ignorant violence, he set an ex- 
ample of character always honest, chiv- 
alric, and nobly virile ; and from him 
more than from any other American, 
with the possible exception of Daniel 
Webster, proceeded the influence which 
made it possible for Abraham Lincoln 
to hold us together as a nation. The 
landscape of our past would indeed be 
lacking, if, looking backward, we failed 
to encounter there the gi'eat Scotch- 
Irish frontiersman, in the high places by 
force of his grit and genius. 



The Mississippi Valley Organized. 



619 



Lacking a thread on which may be 
strung, in a convenient oi-der, the details 
of the development of the Mississippi 
Valley during the nineteenth century, 
nothing better can be done than to trace 
the consequences flowing from the intro- 
duction of two machines, — the steam 
engine as applied to traffic and commu- 
nication, and the cotton gin. These 
potent devices have shaped our ends 
almost as if they were divinities instead 
of mere constructions of matter. The 
steamboat in the West dates from the 
moment when, through Jackson's arm, 
we became secure from foreign attack ; 
the Enterjjrise and JEtna — one of which 
had carried down a cargo of ammunition 
for the army which had defeated Pak- 
enham — being the first craft to make 
their way upstream from New Orleans 
to the Ohio. But deferring until later 
a consideration of the debt of our val- 
ley to the power of steam, the influ- 
ence of the other invention, Eli Whit- 
ney's cotton gin, is even more notewor- 
thy ; for the cotton gin, besides affecting 
vastly material well-being, changed men's 
ways of looking at life, and caused to 
be set up new standards of right and 
wrong. 

From that early time when the cap- 
tive in war, instead of being put to death, 
was preserved, made a servtts, down 
through all the ages, human slavery has 
existed, and even in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, up to near the end, there were few 
indeed disposed to question the right of 
it. Merchants of Boston and Newport 
used their ships in the slave trade with- 
out scruple ; and if a doctor of divinity, 
wanting a servant, shipped a hogshead of 
rum to the West Coast, to be exchanged 
there for a kidnapped boy, such a trans- 
action, far from being held discreditable, 
was not accounted even eccentric. The 
South favored slavery no more than the 
North : the anti - slavery clause of the 
Northwest Ordinance was introduced by 
Southern representatives ; humane spirits 
like Washington and Jefferson, inclined 



to emancipate their slaves, were as nu- 
merous South as North. At the close of 
the eighteenth century slavery appeared 
to be dying everywhere in America : as 
it failed, the conscience of the land as- 
serted itself as to its evil in a way quite 
new. It was the general expectation 
that negro slavery would soon disap- 
pear. It has long been held that the 
cotton gin, invented in 1793, by sudden- 
ly lending new effectiveness to the work 
of negroes in the South, wrought a 
change, spiritual as well as material, — 
the economic advantage lulling to sleep 
the awakening moral sense. As years 
passed and cotton became king, slavery 
grew to be considered as never before, 
the very apple of the patriot's eye. 
Meantime, at the North, no economic 
advantage intervening to favor the pre- 
servation of slavery, it followed the 
course of decay upon which it had en- 
tered, and died out ; and as the century 
advanced, it came to be regarded, under 
the influence of earnest teachers, as the 
chief of human evils. 

Sundered thus as the North and South 
became in their interests and moral con- 
ceptions, a conflict was inevitable, and it 
was first joined in the Mississippi Valley. 
Before 1820, the streams of immigra- 
tion, coming into the Northwest Territo- 
ry up through Kentucky from the south, 
through Ohio and along the Lakes from 
the northeast, were jarring sharply, as 
they met in Indiana and Illinois, over 
slavery ; and now, under the especial 
leadership of Henry Clay, the Missouri 
Compromise, the first effort to adjust the 
difficulty, was put through the federal 
Congress. Slavery being admitted into 
Missouri, it was ordained by Congress 
that all the territory north of Missouri 
should remain forever free ; and with 
this settlement the country went on in a 
somewhat troubled peace for a full gen- 
eration. 

But the black shadow was far enough 
from being removed. Pro-slavery feel- 
ing in the South grew constantly more 



620 



The Mississippi Valley Organized. 



intense, the institution coming to stand 
as the very corner stone of the social 
structure ; in the North abolitionism be- 
came constantly more earnest, and in- 
creasing numbers fell under the spell of 
its great advocates. When, in 1854, Ste- 
phen A. Douglas, of Illinois, declared in 
the Senate that the Missouri Compromise 
was unconstitutional, that Congress had 
no right to declare territory slave or free, 
that only the people on the territory had 
that right, — in a word, the doctrine of 
" squatter sovereignty," — it was the 
forerunner of a cyclone. 

At once Douglas embodied the doc- 
trine of squatter sovereignty in the Ne- 
braska Bill, — the whole valley north 
and west of Missouri being called Ne- 
braska, — and the great war of words 
began which was the prelude to the ac- 
tual clash of arms. In Congress, Sew- 
ard, Chase, Sumner, Giddings, Wade, 
as leaders of the Free - Sellers, ranged 
themselves against Douglas, who rallied 
to his side champions especially from 
the South. Kansas, which had been set 
off from Nebraska, became a seat of tu- 
mult, the Northern immigrants coming 
in such numbers as to arouse in the 
South the fear that squatter sovereign- 
ty would be disastrous to it : incursions 
of border ruffians were encouraged, to 
prevent such a catastrophe. The mo- 
ment when the crisis became tinged with 
the hue of blood was marked by the start- 
ing forth of that most ominous of ap- 
paritions, John Brown of Ossawatomie. 
" Without shedding of blood there can 
be no remission of sins ! " he cried, as he 
smote ; and when, flitting to the valley of 
the Potomac, he appeared on the border 
of the South, his fateful voice summoning 
the slaves to rise against their masters, 
all chance for peace was over. The old 
man's body might lie mouldering in its 
far Northei-n grave, but his soul marched 
on in trooping armies. Douglas, mean- 
time, had been confronted in his own state 
by a champion he could not vanquish. 
They wrestled in field after field, — on 



the hillside, on the prairie, in the forest, 
by the shores of great rivers ; the people 
gathering by many thousands to listen, 
till the blue canopy alone furnished an 
adequate auditorium. Abraham Lincoln 
came off victor ; and now, while the 
South, state by state, ranged itself in re- 
bellion, he stood opposed for the saving 
of the Union. 

While in all this preliminary struggle 
between slavery and freedom it was the 
Mississippi Valley mainly which formed 
the arena, that gloomy distinction can 
hardly be claimed for it after the can- 
non began to thunder. The focus and 
centre of the Civil War was on the soil 
of Virginia, where the largest armies, 
and as far as the South was concerned 
the ablest generals, f ouglit for four years, 
back and forth : on the one hand to seize 
Washington, on the other hand to seize 
Richmond. The operations of the Civil 
War in the Mississippi Valley are to be 
regarded as a vast subsidiary movement 
by which ultimately the flank of Lee was 
turned. 

But if the war in the Mississippi Val- 
ley was in a sense subsidiary, it was by 
no means of small account. Military 
energy did its utmost. Rarely have ar- 
mies been more vast, and only Borodino 
and Leipsic surpass in appalling gran- 
deur the greater battles. The Army of 
Virginia, at the end of four years, lay 
surrounded and helpless, an isolated nu- 
cleus of warlike energy from which every 
supporting connection and attachment 
had been knocked away. On one side 
was the sea, in the hands of its foes ; on 
the other Thomas lowered, about to pour 
through the passes of the Alleghanies. 
Sherman, charged with lightnings, rolled 
up from the south, a tempest gathering 
fury as it sped, while on the north Grant 
smote implacably. Not till then was Lee 
beaten. Appomattox came inevitably, 
and for the Confederacy all was over. 
Slavery was destroyed, and the Union 
was made secure. 

Strange indeed was the development 



The Mississippi Valley Organized. 



621 



which sprang from the cotton gin ; scarce- 
ly less momentous has been the influ- 
ence of the steam engine as applied to 
traffic and communication. The loco- 
motive has succeeded, and often super- 
seded, the steamboat, with results that 
are modifying all the continents. The 
new West, which has come to pass in the 
old Louisiana of the Purchase, was be- 
fore the war in a most incipient stage, 
and as it stands to-day may properly 
be called the child of the locomotive. 
While that extraordinary machine in the 
eastern half of the valley has been a 
powerful modifier, in the western half it 
lias worked almost as a creator. It has 
made possible a reclaiming and popu- 
lating more rapid than has ever before 
been seen when new lands were occu- 
pied. The unknown wilderness of Jef- 
ferson's day has become filled through- 
out with fully organized commonwealths, 
and is about, with the admission of Okla- 
homa, to become, so to speak, politically 
mature. Whether such a rapid exploi- 
tation of the national domain will be for 
the ultimate benefit of our country, or 
otherwise, may well be questioned. Our 
grandchildren may wish their forefathers 
had gone more slowly. 

There are in the Mississippi Valley 
pleasant signs that, although heretofore 
railroads and the country tributary to 
them have often jarred, the expediency 
of harmony is beginning to be recognized, 
with most happy results. That the 
road may flourish, the countiy through 
which it passes must be prosperous. 
What better than for the road to help the 
country prosper ? It has helped ; and 
in this way : Some proper official, — the 
general freight agent, it may be, — study- 
ing his districts to find out for what they 
were best fitted, using the helps which 
in his high place he could easily com- 
mand, has discovered, pei'haps, that to- 
matoes can well be raised here, potatoes 
here ; that here there is a fine opportuni- 
ty for creameries, and here again a good 
field for poultry and eggs. Straightway 



he enters upon a campaign of educa- 
tion. To each village, hamlet, crossroads, 
teachers are sent to convert the farmers 
from their bad methods or unprofitable 
crops. They are instructed as to the 
better ways and the more marketable 
products. Finally, the road engages to 
find a sale for what is raised, and to 
carry it to market at a rate which will 
make sure the farmers' profit. When 
all is done, the country, from being pov- 
erty - stricken, has become a scene of 
plenty ; while the beneficent road — 
beneficent not from a philanthropic im- 
pulse, but simply because it pays to be so 
— reaps a vast advantage from having 
tributary a body of rich and contented 
communities, instead of a population de- 
pressed and struggling. In many places 
of the Mississippi Valley these methods 
have found trial, and the invariable hap- 
py result makes it not doubtful that it 
will influence the policy of the future. 

That we suffer at present is largely 
due to the fact that, in the immense com- 
plexities which modern life develops, we 
do not at first grasp the right handle. 
We may hope it will be better some day 
as regards the problems the railroad 
gives rise to ; as regards the problems, 
also, which the cotton gin has given rise 
to ; for, though slavery has vanished, the 
black shadow has not ceased to hang 
heavily over the Mississippi Valley as 
well as elsewhere. So, too, as regards 
our problems in general, — but a few 
have been hinted at, — the manful heart 
will not consider any of them hopeless,, 
and never before since the world began 
have so many good hands and brains as 
now been ready to work to remove the 
difficulties. 

The Mississippi Valley organized, — a 
basin of unexampled resources, occupied 
by thirty-five million English-speaking 
men possessed of the ancient, well-or- 
dered Anglo-Saxon freedom ! With the 
admission of Oklahoma to statehood, the 
Mississippi Valley may be said to be 
politically complete. The constitutional 



622 The Mississippi Valley Organized. 

framework will be all in place in twen- centuries, by liberty - loving peoples, 

ty - three commonwealths. As a vine With their life so braced and directed, 

expands over its supporting trellis, so the states of the Mississippi Valley pos- 

the life of these millions will be upheld sess the most favorable conditions for a 

and guided in future years by these con- perfect evolution. While their history 

structions, begun before Alfred's day, but in the past is full of interest, they can 

confirmed and perfected, during many face the future with high hope. 

James K. Hosmer. 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 540 626 2 



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